Meet Jon, our CRM Product Manager
Meet Jon, our CRM product manager. Jon’s been with us at Acre since April 2021.
What made you want to join Acre?
There's nothing more exciting than growing something from the start. Building a team, the product, the processes and watching it evolve.
This is very true at Acre. We directly affect the product, the road map, and the vision. So we get to watch the first time our users interact with the product, and it's fascinating to be here from the start, which ticks all my boxes!
I’ve previously worked at large corporate entities however, there are too many barriers for change, red tape, politics, and the pace is too slow. Acre offers me an environment where I can thrive, be in the midst of where things happen and disrupt the big corporates trying to do the same.
What does a typical day look like for you?
As a product manager, my delivery is all made by the clever individuals working on my features. My daily priority is to ensure the engineers have everything they need and that they understand what needs doing. If they do get blocked, I'm here to remove those blockers and keep the momentum going.
Much of my day is made up of working directly with those individuals. I love testing and visualising ongoing work in progress, ensuring it follows the right path. This way, there's never any surprises once a feature is finished!
Aside from this, I’ll often outline and define the following significant feature to work on, test the system, and help with support queries.
Acre offers me an environment where I can thrive
What were you doing before?
In what feels like a previous life, I worked at another fintech start-up building similar tools and products, but it was much closer to the external client-side of things. Before that I worked in larger enterprises, and had a good stint working as the Head of Research and Development at a telecoms firm. I've also done a lot of software work in the insurance sector for Aviva.
What’s your go-to lunch (and why)?
My go to lunch very much depends on whether I’m in London or working from home in Bournemouth.
When I work from home, my go-to lunch is very much ran sacking the fridge for leftovers and having those.
When I work in London, I pretty much rely on asking my food-wingman, Bhargava, to work out which new place we can tick off the list.
What superhero power do you bring to the team?
I think I'm usually the over-excited guy about a silly fix or new feature...
On a more serious note, in my career, I've always been lauded as the calm guy. I've always worked in software delivery, often delivering software updates to thousands of individuals with the possibility of breaking things.
As a result, I've always been given positive feedback on my ability to draw a plan forward from a less than desirable situation (when unfortunate events occur), while maintaining a degree of calm and collectedness.